Patients who have in the past been given a faecal transplant through an enema may now be offered an easier treatment, in what is known as the poo pill.

The bacterial infection clostridium difficile is deadly. The condition causes diarrhoea, weight loss and can lead to kidney failure.

It kills 14,000 people a year in the United States and there have also been out outbreaks in Australia.

Traditional antibiotic treatment can actually be harmful to patients' bowels and a new method involving transplanting gut bacteria to recovering patients has had success.

Until now the best way of getting good bacteria back involves a stool sample from a healthy donor and a rudimentary rectal transplant system.

But now Doctor Thomas Louie of the University of Calgary in Canada has developed a way of washing the donor's donation and reducing it down to the important bacteria so that it can be swallowed as a pill.

"[It's] basically bacteria, and it looks like peanut butter," she told The World Today.

"[There's] not much smell because all the stuff has been washed away and basically we would add a little bit of saline to make it flow a little bit, then basically put it into the capsules."

The capsules deliver bacteria to the right place because they only dissolve when they are past the stomach.

Dr Louie says treating clostridium difficile with traditional antibiotics can increase the likelihood of re-infection in many cases.

"As we are treating C diff with our standard antibiotics, we are also damaging the bowel flora, and that's the reason for the recurrences," he said.

Professor Thomas Riley, one of Australia's leading experts on C diff, says faecal transplants have been very successful.

"The results of the transplant are just remarkable. The response is 90-95 per cent better than any of the drug treatments," he said.

He says doctors ensure that those donating have no harmful infections they could pass on.

"Donors have had cultures to look for dangerous bacteria, they're screened for parasites and worm," Professor Riley said.

"They happen to be family members, so they're not strangers - that's also important as well.

"At least you know where the sample came from - it wasn't like somebody you didn't know. You want to keep it within the family."

Dr Louie admits that although it may be better than having an enema, eating the so-called poo pills has not yet got around what he refers to as the "yuck" factor.

Professor Riley suggests the treatment could be made more palatable still if we took things one step further.

"What we should be doing is collecting our own poo and turning that into pills and having a 'poo bank'," he said.

"I mean, we have a blood bank and we have bone and tissue banks these days.

"But the idea of using your own bugs and then, if you are going to go in to hospital or a situation where you're going to need to take antibiotics, then you could swallow some of these pills and they would be quite protective, I suspect."